first attempt at literary journalism

The window in my last Brooklyn apartment, a hardwood room in the dim ribcage of a slim maroon townhouse sandwiched between a deli and a men’s barbershop, faces back into a neighborhood block of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Sitting on my fire escape in the June sun, I stare out into a vacant lot between the rows of houses, empty but for two scraggly trees, a grill, and a ripped tire sitting in the gravel. I hear a gospel choir practicing at the Baptist church, two blocks east. Through a chain link fence, I look down into the street toward Nostrand Ave, one of the neighborhood’s busiest avenues. The cracked, uneven sidewalks are lined with brownstones and local businesses: Star’s Bar, Momma’s Kitchen: Food for the Soul, Malcolm X Bookstore & Barber, Brooklyn Deli, Dominican Hair, Miss Dahlia’s Bakery. Dahlia’s is famous for her cucumber lemonade and coconut cakes, recipes the original Miss Dahlia brought with her from Mississippi in the 1920s. I walk past these shops every day toward the subway station, the post office, or the Fulton Street Grocery.

While shopping in the Grocery, I’ve been stopped in the aisle several times by irate women who block my path, refusing to let me pass, sometimes hissing under their breath. These same women often guard the washing machines in the laundromat, telling their children to stand in front of them when I try to load my laundry and glaring me when I say hello to their daughters. For the first month, I thought I was doing something wrong, breaking some unspoken neighborhood law concerning the pasta aisle or laundry hampers. Then, one afternoon in the Grocery, a woman ran at me in the cereal aisle and rammed me with her shopping cart. “White folks!” she shouted. “Why you white folks gotta move here, to our neighborhood? Our neighborhood!”